en for a little garden, bedding plants are very expensive. For you
must either use plenty, or leave it alone. A ragged ribbon-border can
have no admirers.

If time and money are both lacking, and horticulture is not a hobby,
divide what sum you are prepared to spend on your little garden in
two. Lay out half in making good soil, and spend the rest on a limited
range of hardy plants. If mother earth is well fed, and if you have
got her _deep down_, and not a surface layer of half a foot on a
substratum of builder's rubbish, she will take care of every plant you
commit to her hold. I should give up the back of the borders (if the
aspect is east or south) to a few very good "perpetual" roses to cut
from; dwarfs, not standards; and for the line of colour in front it
will be no great trouble to arrange roughly to have red, white, blue,
and yellow alternately.

One of the best cheap bedders is Pink Catchfly (_Silene pendula_). Its
rosy cushions are as neat and as lasting as Blue Lobelia. It is a
hardy annual, but the plants should be autumn sown of the year before.
It flowers early and long, and its place might be taken for the autumn
by scarlet dwarf nasturtiums, or clumps of geranium. Pink Catchfly,
Blue Forget-me-not, White Arabis, and Yellow Viola would make gay any
Spring border. Then to show, to last, and to cut from, few flowers
rival the self-coloured pansies (Viola class). Blue, white, purple,
and yellow alternately, they are charming, and if in good soil, well
watered in drought, and constantly cut from, they bloom the whole
summer long. And some of them are very fragrant. The secret of success
with these is never to leave a flower to go to seed. They are not cut
off by autumnal frosts. On the contrary, you can take them up, and
divide, and reset, and send a portion to other little gardens where
they are lacking.

All mine (and they have been very gay this year and very sweet) I owe
to the bounty of friends who garden _non sibi sed toti_.

Lastly, if there is even a very little taste and time to spare, surely
nothing can be so satisfactory as a garden full of such flowers as (in
the words of John Parkinson) "our English ayre will permitt to be
noursed up." Bearing in mind these counsels:

Make a wise selection of hardy plants. Grow only good sorts, and of
these choose what suit your soil and climate. Give them space and good
feeding. Disturb the roots as little as possible, and cut the flowers
constantly. Then